The Magician's Wife by James M. Cain

First published in 1965; published digitally by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media on January 15, 2013

The Magician's Wife was first published in 1965. Taking it on its own terms, without comparison to James M. Cain's classic hard-boiled fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, it is a flawed but entertaining crime story.

Clay Lockwood is an executive working for a large meat distributor. He begins an affair with Sally Alexis, who trains the waitresses at a popular restaurant chain. Sally is married to a magician. After two hours in bed that must have been amazing, Clay wants to spend the rest of his life with Sally. Yet Sally won't get a divorce while her husband's wealthy father lives, because she fears her father-in-law would punish her by disinheriting her son. Adding some zest to the story is the magician's bosomy assistant, a sparkplug named Buster who makes passes at Clay when she isn't pursuing the magician and pretty much every other successful man she meets.

Before long Sally's mother, Grace, enters the story, and Clay briefly turns his amorous attention toward her. Soon thereafter, entirely too coincidentally, Clay meets the magician, a vain chap he instantly dislikes. Still, having met the guy, Clay feels he can no longer be a weasel. He wants Sally to confront the magician and divorce him, a plan Sally promptly rejects because there's not enough money in it. For Sally to really make out, both her father-in-law and her husband need to die. You can see where this is going, right? Actually, a reader won't know exactly where the story is going because the plot takes some unexpected turns.

I never quite believe stories in which a guy not only falls in love with a woman on their first night together but insists they get married -- unless the guy is a desperate loser, which Clay isn't. Neither did I believe that any man in Clay's position would fall in love with Sally. Apart from being scheming and greedy, she's more than a little crazy, as she demonstrates when she destroys Clay's apartment and hacks his artwork to pieces during a lover's quarrel. Maybe if Clay had known this nutcase more than a short time I could understand his feelings for her, but Cain didn't sell me on the relationship. Any sane man would have been horrified every time he had a conversation with her.

I also had trouble believing that Clay broke up with the woman he loved and the next night was hitting on her mother. In fact, Clay repeatedly bounces from Sally to Grace and back, apparently happy to settle for either one of them. And then there's Buster, who rates an enjoyable kiss. I mean, I know guys are dogs, but come on! If Clay's behavior isn't quite admirable, it at least has the virtue of being amusing. It's even more amusing that he proposes to women he hardly knows as casually as if he were ordering a steak from a menu.

Although the novel was written in 1965, the courtroom scenes have the sort of drama that is common to crime novels of the 1940s and 1950s. The defense lawyer argues his case and cross-examines with rhetorical flourishes that give the story its best moments. The novel bristles with tension in the last few chapters, although the ending is something of a let down.

Clay is always telling himself to get on with his life while making one decision after another that undermines that desire. That's a common failing and Cain illustrates it convincingly. Notwithstanding my inability to believe some aspects of Clay's character, I found it easy to sympathize with him, despite his less-than-exemplary conduct during much of the novel. Only a good writer can pull that off. I recommend The Magician's Wife to crime fiction fans for that reason, and for the novel's entertaining moments, despite its flaws.

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